In many enterprises, such as businesses, educational organizations, government agencies, many applications can share a common resource, such as a server farm in a data center. To provision virtual environments in the shared infrastructure for such applications (where a virtual environment refers to some partition of the shared infrastructure for the respective application), information technology (IT) personnel typically have to perform manual configuration of hardware and/or software resources of the shared infrastructure. Manually configuring an environment for an application is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that can take many days or even weeks. Also, making changes to such an environment is also a relatively long process.
To support manual configuration of environments in a large enterprise, a large number of IT personnel typically has to be available. However, cost constraints have reduced the number of IT personnel that are available to an enterprise, which makes timely deployment of relatively large numbers of applications difficult.